Critics go berserker for Logan: the greatest Wolverine movie?

The first reviews for ‘Logan’ are in – and if this is indeed Hugh Jackman’s swansong as the iconic superhero Wolverine, it looks he’s really going out with a bang.

With 57 reviews taken into account thus far at Rotten Tomatoes, ‘Logan’ currently has a magnificent 96% fresh rating – the highest score yet for an entry in the ‘X-Men’ series.

Chris Sawin of Examiner.com gives the film an 8.5/10 score, declaring it “the mercilessly barbaric Wolverine film you have always wanted… Beautifully bleak and faithful to the source material.”

Daily Telegraph’s Robbie Collin rates ‘Logan’ a 4/5, describing it as “something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.” James Mottram of Total Film also gives it a 4/5, hailing it as “full of juicy surprises. But what impresses most is how, for once, this is a comic-book film that has the guts to wrap things up.”

Geoffrey McNab of The Independent also rates ‘Logan’ at 4/5, calling it “a Marvel movie with a bit of soul and some true grit,” which “plays more like a late period John Wayne western than it does like a conventional superhero film.”

As this is the first Wolverine movie to go above a PG-13/12A rating, the reviews unsurprisingly take note of the more mature content: Chris Sawin stresses that it’s “chock full of blood, gore, and extreme vulgarity even South Park would be proud of,” and Fred Topel of We Live Entertainment declares it “way bloodier than ‘Deadpool,'” but Tasha Robinson of The Verge also notes, “the weight of graphic, grotesque violence hangs over the entire movie. But the daring emotional violence lingers longer, well after the lights go down on the final shot.”

The only negative reviews thus far are from Stephanie Zacharek of Time and Tim Grierson of Screen International, who seem to dislike the film’s relentless grimness.

This is very much a return to form for the X-movies, after the lukewarm reception to the last entry ‘X-Men: Apocalypse,’ which scored at 48% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Even the widely acclaimed ‘Deadpool’ only managed 84%; of course, that’s taking into account 288 reviews, so it’s entirely feasible that ‘Logan’s current rating could go down as more reviews are counted.

And of course, this does not yet take into account audience reaction. To date, the X-movie with the highest audience score at Rotten Tomatoes is ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,’ which has a 91% audience rating.

‘Logan’ opens in UK cinemas on 1 March.

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